Brion Nuda Rosch

Brion Nuda Rosch
A painting of a clock and four sculptures and lightbulbs arranged with popular houseplants

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 5th, 6-9 pm

Exhibition Dates: May 5th - June 2nd, 2018

The artist presents a single painting hung above the main gallery floor, viewable from the plants that have been arranged in conversation with four sculptures...

Ooh in time it could have been so much more
The time is precious I know
In time it could have been so much more
The time has nothing to show because
Time won't give me time and
Time makes lovers feel like they've got something real
But you and me we know they've got nothing but time
And time won't give me time, won't give me time (time, time, time)

- Boy George

Brion Nuda Rosch, "Side Portrait with Nose on Wet Clay", Acrylic, found book page, metal, light bulb, bag of unfired wet clay, 2018

Brion Nuda Rosch, "A Friend of Mine has so many Things on his Refrigerator Door he Often Eats Out", Metal, acrylic, magnets, bag of unfired clay, 2018

Brion Nuda Rosch, "Earth Head Light Bulb Wet Earth", acrylic, pigment, fired ceramic, metal, light bulb, bag of unfired wet clay, 2018

Brion Nuda Rosch, "History of man as dictated by a line chart", bent wire, wood, sand, 2018

Brion Nuda Rosch, "Clock (28 Hours)", acrylic, pigment on canvas, 84 x 67 in, 2018

Clumsily camouflaged within the architecture of the gallery space, the looming presence of one of Brion Nuda Rosch’s most recent paintings suspended twenty feet in the air from the gallery’s lofty crossbeams cannot be overstated. As we climb the staircase to the gallery’s second floor, we’re glimpsed by the painting’s front face, scraggly layers of textural paint with diverging markings in Navy blue intersecting at the center of the canvas with a series of fourteen head sized dots orchestrated around the painting’s edge forming the visage of a rudimentary clock. The San Francisco-based artist and curator once described his work as “big, awkward paintings that look like they should have been made in a cave a long time ago”, a gleeful concept given their production in one of the most technologically rooted cities in the world. Upon landing on the second floor of the gallery, we’re met with a gathering of human size plants, sculptures by the artist and lightbulbs–an impromptu audience focused in silence on the painting hanging ominously in the distance. The peculiarity of the whole scene has an almost science-fiction element, reminiscent of the swarming masses of apes writhing about a mysterious monolith in 2001: A Space Oddysey, or the mortal’s worship of the stone flying head in Zardoz. In joining this odd grouping of onlookers and partaking in their gaze at this misshapen clock bathed in sunlight hanging high above the gallery floor, we’re left with a litany of questions ... Do we belong amongst this assembled audience? Does this ragtag audience worship the concept of time just as we do? Are there truly universal concepts of intrigue and beauty shared by humans, houseplants and inanimate objects alike?